Compare Prices on Carnival Breeze Eastern Caribbean Cruises

New entertainment, keep everything else

Sail Date:
May 2013

Destination:
Eastern Caribbean

Embarkation:
Miami

I want to start by saying that I had a ok time on the Carnival Breeze. I've definitely had better times on other cruises, for various reasons. I'll start with the good.GOOD:-Absolutely adored our dinning room staff. This is a recurring theme for my family and I, we always get a home run when it comes to our waiters but this years was the best by far. Cookie, Hendri, Gede, and Vadym were extremely friendly to us and we were sad when the 8 days were up. This was in the Sapphire Restaurant, in my opinion, the better of the two available restaurants. The food was great as well, our head waitress, Cookie was her nickname, got to know us and could tell what we would order halfway through the week. Unfortunately she was struck with an unpleasant injury towards the end of the week, but we did get to see her the last cruise day. Overall our dinning room experience was one of the best by far. 5 star-Italian restaurant was amazing. Great food, a lot of food, and all for a low More
price of 12$. In addition the waiter was very friendly and entertaining. When we ordered our food I decided not to get an appetizer because I knew we were getting a lot of food for the main course, but the waiter was friendly enough to surprise me with an appetizer anyway. I'll tell you, he hit the nail on the head. I did not regret taking it. 5 star for that area.-Buffet area was not as crowded as I had expected. Pizza was good, although a little thin. Burgers were simply great. 4 star-Hasbro the game show was fun and enjoyable. We had a juggler and a ventriloquist one night each over the week and they were fun and entertaining as well. Definitely 5 star-Butch, the cruise director, was pretty good. He did not overkill the PA announcements and had a fun attitude when hosting a show. 5 star-Good choices for Ports of call. We did have a situation on board where we needed to immediately return to St. Thomas for a medical emergency of one of the guests but it did not delay our trip. Plus for Carnival for making sure their guests are well. 5 starNow we get to the bad.BAD:-entertainment. It is a fun ship and I found myself bored and alone most of the cruise or aimlessly wandering the boat looking for something to do. One of the biggest things I look forward to on Carnival are the musical shows. This time around they were known as Divas, Motor City, and Brits. I will forever remember them for all the wrong reasons. Being a performer myself I like to look up to these performers and learn and critique so that I can become a better performer. However I did not learn anything from these 8 performers. First the singing was atrocious and it is the main point of the whole show(s). While I did enjoy the choreography and song choices and scope of the actual shows, I very disdainfully hated the singing. Almost no one clapped after most of the performances. On other boats this was not an issue, where the singers were phenomenal. During the Brits they even had to stop the show for technical reasons. The other annoying aspect of these shows were the background video panels. For gods sake, just put the performers on the stage instead of hiding them behind the screen for 90% of the shows. I believe they just wanted to distract us from the terrible singing by using so many flashy lights. Please, coming from a thespian, CHANGE IT! 1 star-back to the other entertainment. Good thing I traveled with my family, who I could hang out with and relax and play card games otherwise I would have gone crazy. Being 17 and everyone else in my family 18+ meant I missed out on fun activities that are 18+ exclusive. I understand that it is illegal to gamble while 17, but really? 18+ comedy shows? I know people who are 15 and say worse stuff than the comedians. It should at least be 16+ with parental supervision. It's not like it mattered because I was able to walk in without security saying anything. If you are gonna make it 18+ and warn everyone to stay away who is younger, then card people. At least you would be adhering to your own rules. The comedy shows themselves were a hit and miss for me, and not because I am underage. Macio was one of the comedians and he was by far the best out of the four available comedians. 2 star (only because Macio was great)- besides dinner and specialty foods, the buffet was ok at best. Not too much variety but enough to keep me moderately satisfied. Also the dinning room staff sucks in the morning. We went twice, and the first time they nailed it but the second time they weren't so great. I'm starting to wonder if we were just lucky the first time in our placement of waiters. 2 stars-the new decor just didnt work for me this time. I don't know, but I thought the style of the boat wasn't great, or as great as I was expecting with the new designer. 3 stars-room stewards was friendly, as they usually are. But towels were sometimes lacking. 2 1/2 stars-the boat was usually extremely hot inside. Cold enough to cope but not as nice and chilly as previous ships. Trust me it makes a difference when you come back from a hot island all day and you want to relax in you cold cabin. Also the elevator situation was a mess. One elevator was on its way to pick us up and we literally watched the light above the doors turn off. It made me wonder what happened. While on the elevators, one could really feel them rocking back and forth, making people feel very unsafe. There also was too many people on the boat and not enough elevators. I found myself walking on the stairs a lot during the week out of impatience for the elevator to never show up. Not a big deal to walk 3 flights of stairs but going up and down all of the stairs due to a lack of elevators is very cumbersome. 1 starDespite these cons, I believe I will give Carnival future chances as these disappointments only really happened on this boat in particular. Less